


a loaded god complex (cock it and pull it)

by rillrill



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Anxiety, Catholic Guilt, Character Study, Codependency, Control Issues, Delusions, Light Genderfuckery, M/M, No Safeword, Panic Attacks, Priest Kink, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-17
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-25 18:00:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2631008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He likes that he doesn’t have to think about this, that it just is what it is and will continue to be what it is every day for the foreseeable future. The sun will rise in the east and set in the west and Mac will be there, raw and needy and eager to please and easy to shape, pliable as modeling clay and ready to mold himself into whatever Dennis needs him to be that day.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	a loaded god complex (cock it and pull it)

**Author's Note:**

> General CW for Dennis Reynolds's existence. Heed the tags, I guess. Anxiety/panic attack talk, Very Bad Thoughts, bad BDSM etiquette, delusional thinking, etc.
> 
> Listen to "Cry For Judas" by the Mountain Goats after you read this for the ~optimal experience~ or if you just wanna be cool idk man do what you want

i. 

Sometimes, and Dennis would be loath to admit this to anyone but himself, but there are times when he can feel the entire world constricting and folding in on itself, squeezing him tighter and tighter until he can barely breathe. The air catches in his throat and his vision flickers in and out a little at the edges until he’s clawing at his own skin, desperate for reassurance that he’s still here and he’s still alive. It’s almost like when he stands up too quickly and nearly passes out from the blood rushing to his head, that brief moment of wondering whether he’s even a real person living a life of his own or just a cruel hallucination in someone else’s mind. And then a moment later, his vision is fine and everything is as it always has been and he wonders what the fuck is wrong with his mind.

Sometimes he can feel himself starting to fall over that precipice and hits the brakes as hard as he can in anticipation, whiplash be damned. He strokes at the nape of his neck and rubs his palms along his face and hopes that no one else notices, that no one else will dare to ask him why he looks as if he’s about to unravel at the seams. No one ever does, of course.

He’s easily the most observant of the gang. He knows that, without a doubt. He hasn’t kept slavishly detailed files on these people for years without having an innate understanding of his own place within their ranks. He knows what makes them tick, knows how to draw out their fears and bad sides and play them against each other for sport and his own amusement. “Always have the upper hand,” says a note scrawled in his high-school handwriting (it was so much neater back then) near the top of Mac’s file. With Mac, it’s almost too easy. There’s the God thing, the gay thing, the masculinity thing. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope of insecurities, reflecting and reacting against each other in endless combinations, moveable and changeable with only a twist of his hand.

What he wants is control. What he wants is to hold the world in so tight a grip that the panic and the breathless spurts disappear forever.

 

ii.

Mac comes home with a bottle of very expensive scotch, which he apparently obtained through some fracas involving Frank and Charlie and a raffle basket that none of them technically won. Dennis doesn’t ask. He pours them both a generous amount and they clink their glasses showily. 

He thinks about how this is easily the longest, most meaningful relationship he’s had with another person outside of Dee and Frank, and arguably the most meaningful one, period. He doesn’t really like thinking about this at all. Mac isn’t someone he needs to think about in grandiose macro terms. Mac is there, period, and will always be there, an immovable object against his unstoppable force. Mac will peel his apples and makes sure the laundry gets done and fuck him until he feels something when the nothingness starts to get to him and call him to check in when they go more than an hour apart. He likes that he doesn’t have to think about this, that it just is what it is and will continue to be what it is every day for the foreseeable future. The sun will rise in the east and set in the west and Mac will be there, raw and needy and eager to please and easy to shape, pliable as modeling clay and ready to mold himself into whatever Dennis needs him to be that day.

Sometimes Dennis feels everything and nothing at the same time. In those moments, he is both creator and destroyer, a man but something greater than a man at the same time.

Later that night, very drunk and loose and comfortable in their communal skin, they inevitably end up in Dennis’s bed. Mac doesn’t fumble and apologize anymore. He takes what he wants, looking with hungry eyes, kissing and raking nails over Dennis’s skin like a starving man at a feast.

He still slinks off to pray it all away afterward, but only sometimes now. More often, he stays there in the bed, on his back with one knee popped up and an arm folded behind his head, eyes warmer than usual and smiling even more easily than normal. Dennis lights a cigarette and they pass it back and forth, speaking in calm, avoidant sentences. It’s almost normal, like something they could both get used to.

 

iii.

“I’m not gay,” Mac said once, apropos of nothing. 

Dennis had rolled his eyes. “I know,” he said. “You won’t even eat avocado because you think it’s some sort of gay conspiracy.”

“Okay, look, dude, if you want to tell me that avocado pits don’t look like some kind of weird gay sex thing –”

 

iv.

There’s a hypnotic quality to the routine.

He starts in front of the mirror, usually shirtless. The products come out of a box one by one. Dennis applies them meticulously: brushes mascara onto his already-long lashes (and Dee always used to make fun of him for his “cow eyelashes,” the jealousy was so strong in her back then), shimmering peach blush to accentuate the hollows beneath his cheekbones. The shade is called “Orgasm,” because Dennis Reynolds does nothing halfway. He lines his eyes, brushes on red lipstick. Licks his lips and parts them, looking himself over appraisingly in the bathroom mirror. 

He’d fuck him. Anyone would.

When he moves through the world in the day-to-day, he feels like a man—he _is_ a man—but aesthetically, in the mirror, his own features blur the lines between the genders. He exists on a level above simple binaries. He flexes a little, admiring the graceful curvature of the bone and tendons beneath his skin. 

When Mac comes in, Dennis makes careful mental notes of each reaction; how his eyes widen slightly, his mouth goes a little slack. Pupils blown with arousal, pinned against the bathroom door. This is exactly what Mac wants. Dennis is sure of it. He knows his best friend like he knows himself. Mac’s gay as shit, everyone knows and has known it for years, but Dennis is convinced he is the only one who knows about Mac’s attraction to the spaces in between, to soft skin and feminine thighs and cherry-red lips attached to muscle and bone and power.

Mac keeps his eyes open when they kiss. He reaches out, reverently, and with the pad of one thumb swipes away a piece of glitter from beneath Dennis’s eye.

“Mm,” says Mac, in lieu of having something real to say. Dennis can see the red smudges glistening on his lips. 

“That’s right,” Dennis says, using the voice that always works on him, all vibration and low-frequency growling. “I know what you want. I always know what you want, baby boy. Nobody knows you better than me.”

Mac lets out a muffled groan as he grinds experimentally against Dennis’s thigh. Dennis mentally congratulates himself on the execution of this particular theory.

 

v.

They catch the tail end of a Charles Manson documentary on cable one afternoon and Dennis wonders for a while if he could do what that guy did. He imagines himself with a core group of loyal followers, acolytes who would do anything for him, who are so in love with him that they’ll crawl through fire and blood for his approval. He dwells on it for hours, stares into the fridge without taking anything out and showers until the hot water runs cold, imagining a crowd on their knees before him, taking his every word at gospel. He sees all their faces, Charlie and Dee and Frank mixed into a crowd of faceless, large-breasted women offering themselves up as tribute to his worthiness. 

In the fantasy, somewhere near the front, he sees Mac’s face staring up at him, worship in his shining eyes and that happy, sated little smile on his face. He gasps out Mac’s name as he comes on the tile shower wall, hopes the sound of the lukewarm water hitting the tub floor muffled his voice.

At the bar that night, he carries himself a little straighter than usual, staring haughtily at the patrons’ faces as he walks past them, a divine shepherd amongst his flock. He looks down his nose, unsmiling, and swings an arm around Mac’s neck, a designation.

“Mac, baby, I need you to do something for me,” he says, still not smiling.

The next day, he wakes up with a rare hangover buzzing around his temples, a sign that he must have drunk much, much more than normal the previous night, and decides that leading a cult is probably too much fucking work. Those guys have to start early, that’s the thing. If he’d started at twenty, who knows where he’d be now. 

 

vi.

He dresses up as a priest for Halloween, and then again for several more Sundays in succession.

Mac pretends he’s not into it at first, but by the end of that first night, leaning against the wall of Paddy’s least disgusting bathroom stall, he bites out an _Oh Father_ and Dennis smirks up at him from his knees, swallowing clumsily and straightening his collar. The further he can pull Mac from the tethers of his religious devotion, the more secure he feels. It’s a good thing, what they have, but he wants it to be better. Dennis will never be okay with second place, even when it’s to Jesus. _Especially_ when it’s Jesus, fuck’s sake. He’ll demolish anyone or anything standing in the way of what he wants, and if that means slowly taking a chisel to Mac’s faith, bit by crumbling bit until all that stands are hollow rituals and a weekly rote confession, he’s more than willing to do it.

He just doesn’t want him to leave. If Dennis wants this to end, it will be on his own terms. 

“You’re not as smart as you think you are,” Dee says to him offhandedly one Tuesday night. 

“What are you talking about?”

She waves a hand absentmindedly. “You know. You think you’re always one step ahead of everyone, all manipulative and shit, but it’s not like you’re that good at it. Everyone knows what you’re trying to do.”

“I’m not—”

“You’re trying to fuck with Mac’s whole Jesus complex because you’re afraid he’s not already obsessed enough with you,” she says, setting down the glass she’s been wiping off for the past two minutes and dropping the rag on the bar. “I’m just saying. You’re not that good at it. He knows. We all know.”

 

vii.

The good nights all end differently. The bad nights always end the same.

Sometimes he feels an itch beneath his skin, a kind of burning beneath his nails. It’s not so general as to be called a hunger. It’s more like a craving, pulsing and throbbing in his bloodstream like a heartbeat amplified. These are the nights when he starts to freak himself out a little, walks around the apartment restlessly, fighting back the breathlessness and blurry vision. 

Those are the nights that end in zip ties and duct tape and aching knees on the hardwood floor, with Mac’s hand fisted in his hair, pulling Dennis’s head back as he pounds into him. He tells Mac to be careless and rough on purpose, and they don’t use any sort of safe words or signals, because fuck it, that shit’s for pussies and people who can’t commit. He needs to be taken all the way down and find limits past his limits. 

By the end, he’s bruised and trembling, a fading handprint across his face. He feels used and fucked-out and rubs at the raw spots the zip tie rubbed on his wrists as Mac lays a hand flat against his chest and holds it there, silent. He’s just a man, nothing more, nothing less.

“Okay,” says Mac. It’s both a question and not a question at once.

Dennis doesn’t answer.


End file.
